Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood I watch'd the little circles die; They passed into the level flood, And there a vision caught my eye.
Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes, creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations we seem to watch the artist at his work—to enter in some sort into his very consciousness—as we see him manipulating the form or the thought of his verses:
Τὰ δὲ τορνεύει, τὰ δὲ κολλομελεῖ, καὶ γνωμοτυπεῖ, κᾀυτονομάζει.
Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems, frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837 to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of any other poet. Tasso's variæ lectiones are numerous, but they were mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest, but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still: Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which this is not the occasion.
And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort "restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death, 1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed, are slight—the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetic technique, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to such variæ lectiones as may be referred to motives of more general interest.[B]
The first question which we naturally ask about Wordsworth's corrections is this: Were they improvements? My readers will decide for themselves; for my own part, it seems to me that they generally were improvements; that Wordsworth bettered his text three times out of four when he changed it. Nor is this surprising; few admirers of Wordsworth's poetry will deny that there were many passages quite susceptible of amendment in it; for that task there was ample room. But on the other hand, it happened not infrequently, as we might expect, that when the poet returned, in the critical mood, to mend his first form of expression, he marred it instead. In the poem, for instance, beginning, "Strange fits of passion have I known," the second stanza as originally published ran thus:
When she I loved was strong and gay, And like a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath the evening moon.
—Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
The passage stood thus for many years, and was finally altered to read:
When she I loved looked every day Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening moon.